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Welcome to She They Us, a podcast about making room in housing for women and gender-diverse people brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing.
Join host Andrea Reimer to hear about why Canada’s housing crisis is hitting households led by women and gender-diverse people harder and what you can do about it.
Welcome to She They Us, from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. Your host, Andrea Reimer, is a housing advocate, educator and former Vancouver City Councillor, who's experienced homelessness first-hand. Andrea has spent her career at the intersection of power, policy and courage to catalyze transformative change. And here, she brings that passion to the stories of women and housing across Canada. This...
Is She They Us? A podcast about the women and gender diverse people living at the front lines of Canada's housing crisis. We need to end poverty. We are matriarchs. We are the life givers. We are the pillars of the community. You can't just go willy nilly evicting us. I feel like we honour our ancestors when we make an effort to remind a new generation what that path has been. We've gone so far beyond.
the boundaries of what's humane and it has to change. There's so many people that are trying to do just that. hopes for African Women's Alliance is that housing in Canada becomes truly inclusive, accessible. Home is much more than four walls. It's safety, stability, and a place where I can just be myself without fear, where I can live with dignity.
Welcome to episode two of this third season of She, They, Us, a podcast about the women and gender diverse people living at the front lines of Canada's housing crisis. This season, we are focusing on context. When we talk about Canada's housing crisis, we often hear people focusing on how things used to work, got broken, and then argue about how to fix it. The reality is that for households led by women and gender diverse people in Canada,
Finding safe, affordable, secure, and appropriate housing has always been very difficult. Last episode, we heard from Marie, a First Nations woman who has fought to access safe housing on her homelands. It's been a difficult road for her, and as the chair of the National Indigenous Women's Housing Network, she's used what she's learned in her fight to support other Indigenous women and gender diverse people to fight for better housing too.
It's important to note that not all Indigenous people in Canada are First Nations. In addition to First Nations people, there are Métis and Inuit peoples. All three groups, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, are recognized in Section 35.2 of the Constitution Act of 1982 as, the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, end quote. All have Aboriginal rights that include hunting, fishing, land, and self-government.
but how those rights are defined and implemented differs significantly between the three groups. First Nations are the only Indigenous group governed under the Indian Act, a colonial law that still structures many aspects of life, governance, and land for those nations. Métis is often confused by non-Indigenous Canadians with people who are mixed race, but Métis actually refers to a culturally distinct people
who are the direct descendants of early relationships between French colonists and First Nations women. Métis people were also included in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, but their specific rights were not clearly recognized by the courts until much later. Métis generally do not have reserved lands, though some Métis settlements exist in Alberta under provincial law, and there are many historic Métis communities throughout the Canadian prairies. And there are the Inuit.
whose rights are primarily defined through comprehensive modern land claims agreements, which recognize their ownership of vast northern lands and their role in managing resources and the environment. These agreements led to the creation of Nunavut in 1999, a territory where Inuit form the majority and lead a public government alongside regional Inuit organizations that represent their interests, protect their culture, and guide decisions about the land and its future.
Finally, not all Indigenous people live on their nation's reserves, settlements, or regions where their rights can be fully enforced. In fact, the 2021 census found that 82%, or about 1.5 million Indigenous people in Canada, are in this situation. In addition to being First Nations, Métis, or Inuit, these folks are also called, quote unquote, urban Indigenous people. And in this episode, we will talk with two of them, starting with Pamela.
creating those little spaces for the little ones to feel safe and loved and nurtured so that they can have all their needs met and go to school and learn and go home to a warm bed and food on the table. I don't think it's too much to ask for us to create a home for everybody. A note before we dive in. This episode contains content that could be challenging for folks who've dealt with child abductions, mental health struggles, and substance use. Please take good care while listening.
My name is Pamela Spurvy. I'm an Indigenous Cree woman from Treaty Six territory. My home nation is Beaver Lake Cree Nation. I do reside in Edmonton, Alberta. The type of housing I'm living in right now is Indigenous housing. actually in the process of moving into an Indigenous-led organization housing place where I will be an auntie.
I will be going in there residing, but also showing up in our culture as an auntie, as someone who walks beside family. yeah, so that will be a new home within a month. Well, that's amazing. Okay, well, that is so cool. And is it at Niganan? Is it part of the Niganan? Yeah, yeah, it's part of the Niganan organization.
I'll be moving into a building that is run for women who are getting their children back out of care or families that are reuniting with their children, also a family for elders and they have a few units for youth who are exiting the foster care system and what they try to do is engage people that are living there in culturally inclusive programming.
Or also just we show up, have kookums on site and mushums and they also want to have an auntie role. just be walking beside families who are coming back to their children and trying to navigate substance use and mental health and reconnecting with culture. So I'm really looking forward to what that's going to look like. It's brand new. So I'll be coming in very slowly and I have a lot of learning to do.
but I'm excited to see what this new position will bring for my life. Pamela and I know each other through the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing, and I have noticed that she calls herself an Indigenous woman, but I also know she is a member of a First Nation. I asked her to tell me a bit about that. So I was raised in an urban setting. So that's what I would be called, an urban Indigenous woman, right? Because I wasn't raised on my nation. So the nation that I was part of,
I have never, I had never been to my whole life. I don't know anybody there. I actually did not even receive my status card until about five years ago. And I had to keep waiting for laws to change in order for me to get my status. And I remember somebody asking me why it was so important to me. And I said, because I want to know where my home is. I want to know where I'm from and where I belong. And when I set foot on
the nation of Beaver Lake for the first time I cried because it made me think of all of those ancestors walking on that land before me that I didn't get to meet and how we are now, we as a family are so displaced from that home on the nation. And when I go back there, I don't feel a sense of belonging because I was never raised there, right? So that's for me is the difference I think is when you are not raised.
and you're raised in a city or a different town or you're not from there. It really makes a difference to how you connect culturally, I think. Pamela has been through a lot of housing. In fact, most of the women and gender diverse people I've spoken to have. In the first season, I asked everyone the question of how many places they'd lived. And it turned out that my guests, in just eight episodes, had collectively lived in over 1,000 houses.
Here's Pamela's answer. When I seen that question put to me, I had to go back and really think about how many homes have I lived in? know, how many spaces were homes and how many places where I was just residing? And so I had a lot of places was somewhere where I was just residing and it was not my home. My mom became a young pregnant mom at the age of 16 and was not ready to be a mom. And so
I spent a lot of time in foster care and also being very transient between relatives and family and also people that my mom was just friends with or people that she had met, you know, in her journey of being unhoused. So a lot of displacement. And so it was really hard for me to kind of put a name to how many homes I'd been in.
because there was many different places that were just places where I resided for very short times, but never had the chance to kind of connect it to creating a home environment. So probably at least over 40, I'd say. Pamela makes a very interesting distinction between a residence and a home. I asked her if she could tell me more about that, and especially if there was a tangible threshold for her.
between when a place crosses from being a residence to a home. For me, it crosses from residence to home is when it's a space where I have things that were mine. So I had my own bed. I had my own blankets. I had a kitchen that I could go cook a meal in. I was able to have things that I could put up on the walls and create some safety. And so
In a lot of the residence that I was in, that was very difficult to do because a lot of time I was in somebody else's environment where I could not create that and make it my own. It was usually somebody else's stuff, somebody else owned it. I was made to feel uncomfortable being in their spaces, slept in other children's bedrooms on the floor in their beautiful rooms that were not mine. yeah, home is something where it connects to safety.
and gave me a place where I could actually call it mine. This issue comes up a lot with the women and gender diverse people I've talked to since I started the podcast. But I have noticed that it's the most visceral for Indigenous women and gender diverse people of all cultural backgrounds. I asked Pamela about the impacts of not having safe housing. They've impacted other areas of my life quite profoundly, all the way from food security,
all the way from how I felt about myself as a woman, how I felt about my safety from some of the men that were in those environments where I couldn't protect myself. So in my confidence, how I felt loved, in my anxiety, it impacted all areas of my life. The Pamela I know is both strong and fiercely grounded. It's very hard to imagine her feeling insecure or unsafe or displaced.
I asked her if she could tell me about the middle of her housing journey and how she got from those difficult early years to where she is now. There's been so many beautiful things that have happened along the way, but just that the right support is what changed everything for me. I know when I had become really displaced in my addiction and I was couch surfing and my kids were in care.
and it was time for them to come home. I was homeless and my kids were, it was time for me to get them back out of care. That was not easy for one, trying to get my kids out of care and having a home ready for them because I didn't have income. I didn't have income because I was on Alberta Works and trying to establish getting, you know, a three-bedroom place is what I had to have. four children coming home out of care and
I didn't have the money to get afford, like get a, even get the proper housing because I was a single person and I couldn't get money without my kids being home. So it was this double edged sword of trying to navigate all these systems. And what really worked for me was a lot of nonprofit agencies that I went to and accessed and shared my story with them helping me navigate how to
get through applying for low-income housing. It was actually a really difficult journey because there was such huge waiting lists. There was up to two to three years waiting lists. And I actually had to live in a year-long recovery program for women getting their children back. And we lived in a two-bedroom apartment with five people. And so what made that comfortable though, and made it a little more easy was that we had on-site
support systems. So we had programming that was for families, we had events that we were able to attend. I had coats for kids that helped me navigate being able to get winter clothes for my kids, tools for school that helped navigate school supplies, hot lunch programs. So there was all of these different resources that were available in the community that helped with that transition, even
Some churches that donated furniture for when I actually was moving out of that apartment. It was actually furnished and I had to move out of that apartment when I got my low-income place and we were moving in with absolutely nothing and it was like churches and community that came together and bought beds for my kids and got me furniture and dishes and stuff.
It was all of those, just seeing all of those people come together to help us to become a family again is something that helped me feel safe and loved and valued and seeing that I was worth being a mom to these children again. Wow. That's a very powerful story, like a powerful experience, but you tell the story so well. We've spent a bit of time together now and I see that you're very connected to culture or working to connect to culture, I think, for those of us who grow up.
outside communities, it's a journey. How much has that made a difference in terms of your journey? I think that's been the biggest difference for me. Growing up, for me, at being an Indigenous child, I faced a lot of stigma from different foster homes and different places that I was part of. I remember just being called, you know, dirty little Indian and nobody wanted me. because we came from
a poor family in a small community. There was lots of stigma that I faced. So I always say from a child, always understood that I didn't belong and I didn't know why I didn't belong, but people made sure to share with me that I didn't. And so I didn't understand the terminology they used were calling me a dirty little Indian because my family was very, very ashamed of being indigenous because of the trauma that they had experienced. And so as I got older, I
started to become curious about my culture because I myself have Indigenous children and so I didn't want them to feel the same things that I felt growing up. And so I started to become more curious about culture. And even in becoming curious about who I was as an Indigenous person, it was a difficult journey because I had a lot of shame. Because of foster care, I was forced into a lot of different religions as part of wherever I was staying.
So I almost had this little bit of fear because I had a lack of understanding of how to connect to that culture. But once I started to connect to that culture and go, I went to my first sweat. That's where everything changed for me. I went to a sweat lodge while I was in treatment and they said, it's like going back into your mother's womb. And so I remember going into that sweat and just feeling.
so safe and so loved and surrounded by so many of my ancestors. I remember just like I cried and I cried and I hadn't released tears for a really long time. And when I came out of there, I came out wet and I felt like I just, you know, I came out refreshed and I came out feeling so alive and I wanted more of that. And so I started to attend different spaces, begin to meet different elders and hear the stories of our people.
And I think that was the first time when I was in treatment is that I heard the word intergenerational trauma and truly understood what it meant and started to understand the history of our people. And the history of our people actually really gave me a sense of pride because I realized how much they had went through, but how also how hard they fought to keep our culture alive and how hard they fought to keep our bundles alive and keep those teachings alive. Even though all of those things had become
taken away from them through the different systems that they had to navigate, like residential schools, the 60 scoop, all of those different things. Somehow, our elders were able to keep our language and our culture alive. And that, I found that so beautiful that it's something that it actually drew me to it even more because I wanted to be able to be that person that was going to keep that life not only within me, but within my family system.
And so I started to learn what it really meant to smudge, what it really meant to go to a sweat, to really walk in my story in a prideful way. I always say that I'm part of intergenerational strength. Like, that's what I see it as. I don't see us as a broken people, but as a strong people. Pamela's connection to her family's trauma, the intergenerational trauma and the strength that's created in Pamela brings us back full circle to the why of this season.
I asked Pamela how she thinks the historical experiences Indigenous women and families have faced are connected to the challenges and barriers they are facing today. I think something that stands out for me the most at this time is colonization hasn't gone away and people are still facing it in many, different ways, especially being displaced from their nations. So a lot of people leave their nations because of the lack of
resources that are on the nations and they come to urban settings to try to make a better life for themselves. And then when they get here, it's not made easy for them. A lot of the young ones that come this way end up getting involved in sexual exploitation, in gangs, being displaced from their family, coming here and being vulnerable to people on the streets. There's lots kind of happening for them. And
A lot of the times the Indigenous people trying to access our systems have already got a flag, right? Especially if it's an Indigenous mom going into the hospital to have a child. The big thing that I see is the lack of supports that's being offered to the mother when they come in and they take that child away from that mother from the hospital. This mother is discharged without any access to services. And I can't even, I remember being in that place. It's a horrible place to be.
and really understanding how the history of a family can really affect a person generationally, right? And so I think that that comes up with a history of these women when they're trying to create homes for their own children, is they don't know how to create a home because it wasn't something that was given to them. So being able to walk beside people and understand that, you know, there's a difference between a residence and creating a home and
It's really something that I see that is happening that is really sad for me as I see a lot of women and men coming into the treatment centers that cannot get back to their kids because of the barriers that are put in place for them to try to get home to their children. And it's very disheartening to see how difficult we make it. We will give somebody $1,800 to take care of somebody's child in the foster care system.
but we won't give the mom what she needs to get her kids home or the support that she needs to have somebody kind of supporting her with her children as they're transitioning home. Because when your kids are transitioning home out of care, it's a big event for everybody involved because these kids haven't had their mom for a really long time and these moms haven't been moms for a really long time.
I always relate it to, didn't even really wasn't my kid's mom for a really long time. And I didn't even know their shoe size. I didn't know their favorite colors. I hadn't raised them for a while. I didn't know their behaviors or how they were gonna react to things. So I don't, I feel like we need to give more space to that when these families are trying to reunite and become families or they are going through.
housing precarity, just how difficult it is, is not only on the women, but on the children that are facing that with that mother. So it really does have a ripple effect on the family system. People listening to this may be wondering if Pamela is entitled to housing in her home community of Beaver Lake Cree Nation. So I asked her about that and whether she thought she could go back to the reserve her family is from. Technically, I probably am. I would never, ever get it.
Because this is a very touchy subject and a difficult one. Just because I know of what happens on nations from my children who actually work for their nation. And there's a lot of lateral violence and nepotism that actually happens between our own people, unfortunately, because of the way systems are set up. And so there's favoritism, there's different things that happen. I'm just really cautious to speak to that.
That's the stigma and I think the bias is that people think that even Indigenous people get everything for free. And it's not that way, right? We work really hard for what we have and housing is very limited on the nation because all of that land cannot have houses, is not accessible to have a house built on it. There's only so much to go around. And even NPL people treat their homes on the nation. Sometimes they're not treated very well because they weren't
given that skill or somebody didn't walk beside them to help them to know how to have a home. So there's still lots of things that happen that follow people. And yeah, there's a lack of housing on the nations and a lot of times there's four or five families to a home. So me getting a home on my nation would not be something that's in the cards for me.
It's important to remember that unlike Marie from our first episode this season, who grew up in her home community, Pamela is a 60s scoop survivor and as a result grew up off her reserve. We can't just all go home, right? You know, so when you think about a lot of the stuff that's happening within our communities, there's a lot of people that have been displaced from home for a really long time and people are always go to the assumption, well, why can't they just go back home and live there?
You should see all the struggles that we're having right now with the truth and reconciliation of trying to get our kids out of the foster care system and bring them back home. How do we bring them back home? How do we bring them back home to an environment where there's so much growth and healing that has to happen? And so it's very complex. And I think that we need to really think about the complexities of what's happening for people.
around being disconnected from their homelands and trying to build connection with culture in an urban setting. many of the circumstances that Pamela was dealing with sound frustrating, trying to navigate an impossible loop that no matter what she did or how she did it, she set up to fail. It's hard to imagine she wasn't angry at times. And I asked her about this. Yeah, I was a really angry woman.
did not work well with others. I didn't trust people. I tried to push people away and that anger showed up in my substance use and my mental health. And so I really pushed people away. It caused me to manipulate and use the system because I was like, you're gonna hurt me, I'm gonna hurt you. So to come out of that, I think back to what is it that really kind of supported me to make a shift?
And it was how people showed up for me and that people were able to look beyond all of that and see the hurt that was happening inside of me. And it took a few really good women along the way that were able to say, see you and I'm here for you and walk beside me and actually support and give me the life skills to know how to navigate those behaviors because I didn't understand why I was doing them or why they were there.
I had a lot of unlearning to do. That's what I say. It's not so much about learning, but a lot of unlearning because I had picked up a lot of that stuff from my mom and how she navigated the world. And so that's how I chose to navigate the world. It didn't feel good all the time because I also had a really big heart, but I didn't want nobody to see that. And so, you know, these women that I had walked beside me, I wanted to show them
my self-determination and how thankful I was for everything that this community had done to surround me and my family. So what helped me show up was sharing my story and actually, you know, understanding who I was and educating myself on the systems that I was part of. I remember when I started speaking for United Way, I was being a speaker for them.
and I would go around speaking to help them raise dollars for United Way. And I didn't really understand how important that was until I didn't even know that United Way supported a lot of the nonprofits that were helping me to get housed or get a bus ticket. And so when you don't know those things, you don't understand. And it actually helped me to have a lot of gratitude for United Way because I didn't realize how much they actually supported the agencies that helped me get my life back.
So that kind of shifted things for me too. And even with police officers that had arrested me or caused me harm, I also realized they were just doing their job and trying to protect, you know, their community that I was causing harm in, right? So just beginning, I guess, to have understanding and compassion and empathy and really looking at the bigger picture has really helped me heal. There's still a lot of injustice that I see today.
But I've learned that if I show up with my hurt and my anger, nobody's going to hear me. So I do my best to show up with my heart. And when I show up with heart, I feel that people are able to hear me. So I know, you know, I've been in settings where people show up with their pain and when we do that, nobody can hear us. So we can actually show up with that pain, but in a good way through storytelling or
through actions and then systems actually want to work with you and change. So that's how I choose to show up today is because of great women and leaders along the way that have helped me show up for myself. So I love this, but I was just thinking like, so when you think about, you want people to hear you, what do you want them to hear? Like if they could only walk away with one...
picture in their mind? What is the picture? I just really, I want them to see what's strong and not wrong, right? And I think that that's been my motto for a long time is I want you to see how strong I am and not, and not what's wrong with me. Because so many times even how the systems are set up when you think about the pit counts or how we do things like that, or how we build our
applications or things that we do when people are applying for housing or for services, they always want to know how broken you are, which is really, really unfortunate, right? They don't support people to focus on how strong they are. And that's, it's a very deficit-focused system, and which is, it doesn't give people the opportunity to show strength. Even in housing support workers, they'll tell you, they're like,
make sure it sounds as worse as possible so we can get you housed. How sad is that, right? That we have to, that we can't show that we are strong people. And so I really want people to hear the strength that comes from my story, not pity, right? I want them to hear, this is what I went through, but it didn't break me. This is how strong I am and I found a way to navigate your systems.
That's why I struggle with the word resiliency. I'm like, I'm resilient because of the systems that we put in place, not because I wanted to be sometimes, right? It's that I had to learn how to navigate those systems in order to survive and thrive, right? So that's what I want people to hear.
The last question I asked Pamela is what her hope is for the future of households led by Indigenous women in Canada. There's such big hopes. I think because of the work that I'm doing nationally with ATIRA and with the Pad Canadian Conference and with the National Indigenous Housing and Homelessness Network and the Women's National Indigenous Housing and Homelessness Network, really, my hope is that we can work better together.
as organizations to lead with kindness and really walk beside these women that are trying to create homes for their families, but also really hear the families, hear these people, they know what works. We know what works for us. We know what's going to make a home for us. Allow us to be part of those conversations. Allow us to have voices way up there in government. I really...
value the voice of lived experience. And it's really hard to define lived experience because we all have lived experience. But I really want people to hear that lived experience for what it is, not as, for help us to see we're not our stories, right? Like I'm not my past. My past dictated my future for way too long. And I seen it as something that was bad.
But actually today I'm really thankful for my past because it's helping me show up in the world in a good way. So I always tell people, if you can support somebody to have a relationship with their past, then they'll be able to build a future. And so that past is what sometimes keeps us sick, right? Because lots of harm has happened, but if we can heal from that and then learn some of those things, we're going to have an incredible future. So my hope is that we...
create these safe spaces to support families, to build the sense of community, to build a home, you know, to actually feel safe, have the possibility to create trinkets, you know, that their children can have, create memories, you know, even for me and my house, I love that I have my grandchildren always write their heights on the wall.
So it's, you know, creating those little spaces for the little ones to feel safe and loved and nurtured so that they can have all their needs met and go to school and learn and go home to a warm bed and food on the table. So I don't think it's too much to ask for us to create a home for everybody. Pamela's story reminds us that home isn't just a roof. It's the place where you can keep your memories, your kids' drawings and a piece of yourself.
But what happens when even the word home feels uncertain? When identity, safety, and belonging are all moving targets? That's where we're going next. Let's meet Manik, a Métis and Two-Spirit person whose housing story spans seven provinces and more than a few definitions of home.
Hello, my name is Monette Corsall and I am from the Tanaha and Triduan I grew up the Slevetooth, Stamina, Kakait Kukulam I started career as a volunteer at the San Tasta community. So hello! My name is Monette Corsall. I grew up in Tanaha and Triduan territories.
And now I live on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Tumine, Eskakite, and Kukutlum nations here in so-called Kukutlum. Monik is speaking Cree, or Nehiyawaywin, a language that I've been learning, slowly, as a way of reconnecting and reclaiming my own culture, which includes Cree and Métis. I was excited to have understood most of what they said, but I was curious about the words I didn't understand, so I asked them about it.
Absolutely. Well, to be honest with you, I said Tastawianu, so that is a half-breed person and the... Sorry, no, hold on a second. Apatauakosusan is the half-breed and then Tastawianu is like an in-between person. So I actually said I'm a half-breed in-between person and not I'm two-spirit because there isn't really language for that.
So this isn't a podcast about Indigenous Metis First Nations issues, but it is part of what we've been unpacking. shared a good laugh over the definition, but beneath the laugh is a deeply shared truth about the challenges of words that don't have a shared understanding. I also think there's so many misconceptions about what Metis people are. Like it's a one parent Indigenous and one parent isn't, or just that it means mixed and it doesn't take in the...
The that Metis people have a whole cultural identity, whole language, dance, community relations, history. So there is that also that plays a role in how people understand themselves to be Metis or not. Like Pamela, Manik grew up largely outside their home community. Here is their story. So I'll start from the beginning or like my beginning for my experience in housing that wasn't related to like my family unit.
But I did move out the summer in between my grade 11 and grade 12 year. I was 16 at the time. That was a very tumultuous time in my life. I lived in seven different places and that could have been with like friends or boyfriends that were much older that had their own homes already. So mostly I just like bounced around that whole year. And then when I graduated,
I think I must have been 19. I actually bought a house with someone I was dating who's older and his grandparents helped us put this down deposit on this home. And so I think we stayed together for a couple years and this person was actually mentally abusive to me. And it took me a long time to be able to leave. And I would
You know, I was moved into a place by an organization I worked with and then went back and then I moved out with a friend and I took some time to save up the money that I needed to actually move into my own place. And so this would have been the first time I moved out by myself. And I moved into a basement suite of an older man who worked in the mines. So he worked like...
evenings and shift work and all like the complexities of that. But he would party hard and keep me up till like three in the morning. There were times where I had suspected that he had been in my like suite without consent. And I remember just like putting this picture in front of a door. And when I came home, it was like the door had been opened and moved it. And at that point, I was like, no, this is not the home for me.
And so I ended up moving into a different place that was above like a little strip mall. It was probably one of my favorite places to live because I only had one neighbor and it was relatively quiet at night. So then from this point in my life, I had a big mental health crisis and I ended up moving to Manitoba and living with three different family households until
I kind of got to a point where I was like, need to move out of my family's homes. I need to be more self-sufficient. And that was a really hard time in finding a home because I had a cat at the time. So I ended up having to give her away. But I did move in with a couple, like my cousin and a friend and stayed there for a couple of years. I started dating someone and a year later we were in...
a two-bedroom home. It was two levels and it had beautiful backyard where there was like a fire pit and the vines would like climb the fence and there was this like apple tree and it was so beautiful. And I just really appreciated having my own space. I remember like getting really excited about making this home my own and not just my room.
but like an actual space where I could have it represent who I am, who my partner was and the life that we wanted. And there's so many like really big moments in my housing that I'm like, I'm just gonna keep going through them and you can use what you would like. But we ended up going on a trip to the coast and I remember leaving.
and being like, how do I get there? Like, I want to live there. And the next year, my partner at the time actually got a job here. And so that was like super exciting. We gave up our home in Winnipeg and I was looking for housing and I couldn't really find it. It's like quite hard to find pet friendly housing. But I think this is an important part to acknowledge in my story is that when I was ready,
and I knew I was ready and I made that decision. An hour later, I looked online again, which I did continuously throughout that journey. And I found a place that was a two-bedroom, two-bath place in Port Coquitlam near where my sibling lived. And so my experience with housing and when I'm supposed to move is that things flow to the point where I'll get where I need to be.
But there'll be a lot of resistance until that moment and then something gives and then I end up where I'm supposed to be. And so we lived in Port Coquitlam for a couple years and the owners were renewing their mortgage and it was actually going to be quite expensive and they couldn't do that so they actually ended up giving us notice. So we moved out of this really beautiful apartment in this lovely neighbourhood and so
We decided to move to Burnaby right on Hastings and it's so busy. And as someone who's neuro-spicy, sensitive to noises, it wasn't the neighborhood I wanted. It just happened to be a place that we could get because a really hard thing was that I'm a two-spirit person. I wanted to make sure that the home that I was moving into was going to be safe for my visibly trans queer.
relatives, friends that were going to come and visit. not only was it hard to actually communicate with someone through apps or things to even get a viewing of a place, even there's like hundreds of people doing this, it was even harder to go to a place and feel safe there and know that people that I knew would be safe in that place.
And so when we got this place on Hastings, I didn't realize the amount of anxiety and fear that I had until we signed that lease. And I just cried because it was such a hard process. More recently, my partner and I did break up and I needed to find my own home, which is incredibly hard. There's a privilege that comes with having dual income, especially in the greater Vancouver area. And
At this point in time, we had also put down our cat. And so I was like, not ready for that shift, that move. I was grieving a lot. I'm gonna cry right now because this part about...
grieving or struggling with like mental illness and moving at the same time. Those are just big significant changes that make everything so much more complicated. So there was a lot happening in my life and I just said like, I'm not ready to move. I can't move right now. I'm really struggling with the grief I'm carrying. But I put tobacco under my pillow, which is what my
Two-Spirit Nokomak, my Two-Spirit Grandmother's had told me that we asked Creator for help. So I did that. But I was like, I'm not ready to move. So help me, but I'm not ready. And I wasn't sure where I was going to go. And after a few months, that grief had like become less difficult to carry.
I just remember this one moment where I was like, okay, I'm ready. And I expressed that to my friend verbally. I said, I'm ready to move into my own place. And the next day, someone I knew who had told me earlier in the season that they were moving had messaged me and said, hey, I found a place. Do you want to come look at my place? I'd really love to connect you with my landlord. And I said, yes, of course. And so here I am in this home.
As soon as I had said I was ready for this, I was gifted this home. So I do believe that, you know, Creator looks out for us when we ask, but won't help us unless we're ready either. yeah, that was a big part of my journey is also being moved to where I needed to be in the time that I needed to be there. Monique has such a profound sense of home, something I did not have at their age. So it makes me wonder.
Does that sense of home come from the home they experienced in their upbringing or is it a home they didn't experience but wanted to? That is a really profound question and I think it's a little bit complicated. I do think that the home that I have created for myself now and even the homes I created in the past were me wanting to make a safe space for myself because
Growing up, my homes never felt safe. When I moved out into those homes with, you know, these relationships that might not have been good to me, I didn't experience the safety that I wanted. And so in Manitoba, when I was with that partner and we were moving in together, I just remember us being really intentional about the way we created our home and what we would have in it and not even the material items.
for them just being material, but for what experiences they would bring into the space, what they would represent for us. We wanted to make sure that we could have friends over, know, that we could have game sites and things like that. And so the home that I live in now, it has a beautiful space where I can visit. When I think actually about what makes a home,
I think part of it has to do with the things that we put in it, in the spaces we create, bringing those pieces together. But it also is the people we visit with. One of the things that I really loved, and I talked about this, about Port Coquitlam, was actually the bears coming to visit, and the coyotes coming to visit, and the salmon, and we shared that territory together. And so even here, I'm just like talking about the hummingbirds that I can see outside my window.
There's also, there's bears in the area. I was really blessed to see so much bear poo around my neighborhood. And I love them and I'm also very frightened of them. but I'm really grateful to be able to share this space and to be able to witness parts of their being even if it's in the form of droppings around the neighborhood. So yeah, I think it's about how we visit, who we visit with in the spaces that we live.
I asked Manik about how much other parts of their life have been impacted by not having safe, affordable, and appropriate housing. I think that you're right when you talk about this interconnectedness of all the things that exist in our lives because I look at the jobs that I had and the way that they impacted my housing, but also how
that also impacted the relationships I was in or for how long I was in relationships or for how long I stayed in housing that maybe wasn't safe. So I think the income that we have impacts where we can live and the compromises we make on our safety. I think about, you know, wanting to leave relationships but not having the means. Even the housing that I was in.
That affordability of staying or leaving was really complicated. And so that played a really big role on the compromises I made for the housing and to my safety in places and spaces. And also whether it was pet friendly or not, because, you know, we don't want to give up parts of our family just to be able to live somewhere. But that is often the case that lots of people have to do that.
It wasn't until I moved to the greater Vancouver area that I actually started working for this current organization and feel like I'm making a semi-livable wage. Though I wouldn't entirely call it that because housing is so expensive here. I really lucked out on this apartment that I'm in because it is affordable and everything's included. But for the most part, when I looked at
houses online or apartments online for prices that are accessible. A lot of times it was compromising on things that give me nourishment, whether it's being connected to the land, not wanting to live in a basement suite after that experience that I had. That was just something I didn't want to do. I didn't want to experience having someone have direct access to my space. So there are these different...
things that really challenged the way that I found safety and care in my home and the things that I wanted for me. And I think that there's lots of opportunity here. There's lots of things that you can do. You can go to shows. You can, you know, have access to more job security. There's more variety in the jobs that you can have, but then there's this loss of
know, connection to land that's not colonized. As with Pamela, I asked Manik how much connection to culture has played a role in helping them find the strength to get through the challenges and barriers they've faced. After some back and forth about what's been lost to the Métis and Métis kinship over time and how vital strong kinship is to sharing culture, this is where we got to. Sherry Pharrell-Rissette did a thesis on Métis identity. It's called Sewing Ourselves Together.
It talks about how Métis people's kinship systems not only were erased by colonial policy, but also through art, through paintings where they would, you know, paint the untainted Indian and leave out like the Métis family side. And it also talks about how when the script system came out that some people in their family took script and other people moved to the reserve. And so there's these
nuanced pieces that we don't talk about, that maybe we don't know about, that our kinship systems were actually much closer and who we were as a people weren't as separate as they are now. And one of those things that I think about is my relationship to Nehiyaw Cree relatives. Over the past year and a half, I've been mentoring with Dr. Lana Whiskey-Jack from Saddle Lake Cree Nation.
She works at the University of Alberta in the Department of Women and Gender Studies. And her and matriarchal fire keeper Amanda Amund were doing a research project on Two-Spirit youth rights of passage. And within that project, they provided youths their families and service providers access to Ni Hao Cree teachings and ceremony.
And throughout my time going back to the Métis homelands and the territories of the Nehiyaw and Blackfoot people, I recognized that we did have kinship systems and that I recognize even within Machif language, which is, you know, Cree, French, some English, that if language holds our stories, then our Machif language would also hold stories.
that come from our Cree ancestors. And so I've been really blessed to be able to start building back these relationships that were actually erased because of colonization and part of these kinship systems that were erased because of colonization. My last question for Manik. What their hope is for the future of housing for Métis women and gender diverse people?
I don't know if I feel hopeful about the future of housing, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think that I look at my single income and I wonder if I'll ever have my own home. And then I see other families or people that have multiple homes. And seeing the cost of living right now,
I don't know that I feel hopeful unless we have some really significant changes in how not only accessible housing is, but also the wages that we have. And I'm quite privileged again to say that, you know, I live in my own home. And that being said, I do fear a lot about, what happens if, you know, I can't work for some reason? How will I afford the place that I'm in? And I don't...
entirely have a clear answer. I think one of the things that makes me hopeful is that I am part of a community that continuously shows up and cares for each other. When I moved into this home, I had people come and help me move. I had friends, I had family who, you know, helped me load up the moving truck, unload it when I got here. And I thought, well, that's going to be it. Like, they're just going to help me move. then
the rest is on me. And I'm going to cry and this is happy crying because my cousin and her husband came over, helped unload the last of the boxes and then started like wiping out cupboards and putting things away. And I had to like leave right away to return the moving truck. And by the time I came back, they had like set up my patio set so that I would have like a cozy little knick outside. It was still, you know, the end of summer.
and these small gestures.
of kindness and community are the things that give me hope because they might not seem very big, but there was so much tenderness in those gestures. And so even living by myself has been a big transition amongst all of the grief and everything that I've been experiencing. So a friend of mine and I will do like Yut Club and it's just this like basically body doubling where we'll be on the phone or like a video call and I'll be like,
doing dishes and they'll be cleaning the fridge or something where we can actually keep our households running because not only is there like privilege and a dual income, there's privilege in having two people caring for a household. And so even though I don't have that now and it feels like I'm doing dishes forever and cooking forever and doing all of these things forever, I have community who will visit with me while I do those things. I have
you know, my sibling who was like, do you want to come over for dinner tonight? And I'm like, heck yes. I do not want to cook one more meal for myself, you know? And so I think about all of the people that incrementally make my life easier, even by just like small acts of care. And that makes me hopeful. Listening to Manik, I kept thinking about what they said.
that the creator looks out for us when we ask, but won't help us unless we're ready, a theme reflected in Pamela's story as well. It's a powerful way to think about housing too, because for women and gender diverse people, especially Indigenous women and gender diverse people, quote unquote, being ready isn't the problem. The problem is that the systems built to house us were never ready for us. Pamela and Manick's remind us that home is not just where you live.
It's where you're seen, where you're safe, and where your story belongs. As governments debate units and markets, communities are still showing up for each other. Cousins setting up patio chairs, aunties walking beside families, friends keeping each other company while washing the dishes. Those are acts of housing too, the kind that can't be counted in the census, but that make all the difference.
That's it for this episode. Sincere gratitude to Pamela and Manik for sharing their stories. It's very hard to relive some of the worst moments of your life. And I so much appreciate their willingness to do so in the hopes that it will inspire you to action. Honor their courage and amplify their message by sharing this episode. Tagging us at at voice for housing with the number four on social media.
and joining the movement to support women's housing rights by visiting the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing online at pcvwh.ca. In the next episode, we're moving on to talk to some folks whose families came over from Europe years ago and how those experiences have shaped the challenges and barriers for white women to access housing in Canada today.
I want to thank the women and gender diverse people across the country who had the vision to create the pan-Canadian voice for women's housing and the tenacity to keep it going. Because of you, we can imagine a future without the violence, poverty and housing insecurity that so many have endured. I want to share a few resources and a call to action. If you're a woman or gender diverse person who's experienced housing insecurity but feel unsure about sharing your story,
The Pan-Canadian Canadian
And if you haven't personally experienced the housing crisis, we still need you. As many of our guests have said, allies are essential and that means you. Share this podcast, use your voice and help others raise theirs. Thank you to Everything Podcasts for bringing She They Us to the next level. Shout out to Jordan Wong, our sound engineer, Linda Rourke, producer and writer, Lisa Bishop, senior account director, and Jennifer Smith, the executive producer.
Also, a big thanks to Reed Jamison and CBM, who generously provided some of the music you heard on this episode from The Pigeon and the Dove. We're on a shoestring budget and so grateful for their support. And my final two thanks, first to my partner on the She They Ask Project, Anne Valentini with the Strategic Impact Collective, and finally, the project coordinator, Monica Dang. I'm Andrea Reimer.
Thank you for listening to She, They, Us, a podcast from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. You can find other episodes wherever you get your podcasts. I call on every one of you You're my sister, brother too We're all under the same moon There's still something we can
Another Everything Podcasts production. Visit everythingpodcasts.com, a division of Patterson Media.